Dr. Jack Kevorkian, Assisted Suicide Advocate, Dies At 83

Dr. Jacob "Jack" Kevorkian, a Michigan medical pathologist who assisted in 130 suicides, died at the age of 83 at a hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan. He had been there for treatment of kidney and heart problems, and the Detroit Free-Press reports, "His attorney, Mayer Morganroth, said it appears Kevorkian suffered a pulmonary thrombosis when a blood clot from his leg broke free and lodged in his heart." Morganroth said, "It was peaceful, he didn’t feel a thing."

Kevorkian became a national figure, earning the nickname "Dr. Death," in 1990: The NY Times obituary notes that he "challenged social taboos about disease and dying, willfully defied prosecutors and the courts, actively sought national celebrity, and spent eight years in prison after being convicted of second-degree murder in the death of the last of the more than 100 terminally ill patients whose lives he helped end. From June 1990, when he assisted in the first suicide, until March 1999, when he was sentenced to serve 10 to 25 years in a maximum security prison, Dr. Kevorkian was a controversial figure. But his critics and supporters generally agree on this: As a result of his stubborn and often intemperate advocacy for the right of the terminally ill to choose how they die, hospice care has boomed in the United States, and physicians have become more sympathetic to their pain and more willing to prescribe medication to relieve it."

Kevorkian's 1999 conviction was for second murder (here's a Kevorkian timeline), as CNN explains, "stemming from the death of a patient who suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly called Lou Gehrig's disease. He was paroled in 2007." The Free-Press adds, "Gaunt, theatrical and hyperbolic, Kevorkian appeared to demand martyrdom, staging increasingly outlandish provocations from appearing in court as Thomas Jefferson in tri-cornered hat, knee britches and powdered wig to offering for transplant a client’s crudely harvested kidneys. Those who opposed him were denounced as superstitious know-nothings, Dark Ages hypocrites and philosophical cowards."

More recently, he was the subject of a HBO movie, You Don't Know Jack, which had Al Pacino portray him.